How To Write Special Feature Articles Part 20

At the close of an outdoor public meeting the chairman, with fatuous inept.i.tude, shouts that everybody will sing three verses of "America." Granting that the tune is pitched comfortably, the first verse marches with vigor and cert.i.tude, but not for long; dismay soon smites the crowd in sections as the individual consciousness backs and fills amid half learned lines.

The trick of catching hopefully at a neighbor's phrase usually serves to defeat itself, as it unmasks the ignorance of said neighbor, and the tune ends in a sort of polyglot mouthing which is not at all flattering to the denizens of an enlightened community.

These glimpses are not a whit over-drawn, and it is safe to say that they mirror practically every corner of our land to-day. Why is it, then, that the people make such a sorry exhibition of themselves when they attempt to sing the patriotic songs of our country? Is it the tunes or the words or we ourselves?

BEGINNING WITH A STRIKING STATEMENT. When the thought expressed in the first sentence of an article is sufficiently unusual, or is presented in a sufficiently striking form, it at once commands attention. By stimulating interest and curiosity, it leads the average person to read on until he is satisfied.

A striking statement of this sort may serve as the first sentence of one of the other types of beginning, such as the narrative or the descriptive introduction, the quotation, the question, or the direct address. But it may also be used entirely alone.

Since great size is impressive, a statement of the magnitude of something is usually striking. Numerical figures are often used in the opening sentences to produce the impression of enormous size. If these figures are so large that the mind cannot grasp them, it is well, by means of comparisons, to translate them into terms of the reader's own experience. There is always danger of overwhelming and confusing a person with statistics that in the ma.s.s mean little or nothing to him.

To declare in the first sentence that something is the first or the only one of its kind immediately arrests attention, because of the universal interest in the unique.

An unusual prediction is another form of striking statement. To be told at the beginning of an article of some remarkable thing that the future holds in store for him or for his descendants, fascinates the average person as much as does the fortune-teller's prophecy. There is danger of exaggeration, however, in making predictions. When writers magnify the importance of their subject by a.s.suring us that what they are explaining will "revolutionize" our ideas and practices, we are inclined to discount these exaggerated and trite forms of prophecy.

A striking figure of speech--an unusual metaphor, for example--may often be used in the beginning of an article to arouse curiosity. As the comparison in a metaphor is implied rather than expressed, the points of likeness may not immediately be evident to the reader and thus the figurative statement piques his curiosity. A comparison in the form of a simile, or in that of a parable or allegory, may serve as a striking introduction.

A paradox, as a self-contradictory statement, arrests the attention in the initial sentence of an article. Although not always easy to frame, and hence not so often employed as it might be, a paradoxical expression is an excellent device for a writer to keep in mind when some phase of his theme lends itself to such a striking beginning.

Besides these readily cla.s.sified forms of unusual statements, any novel, extraordinary expression that is not too bizarre may be employed. The chief danger to guard against is that of making sensational, exaggerated, or false statements, merely to catch the reader's notice.

STRIKING STATEMENT BEGINNINGS

(1)

(_Ill.u.s.trated World_)

FIRE WRITES A HEART'S RECORD

BY H.G. HUNTING

A human heart, writing its own record with an actual finger of flame, is the startling spectacle that has recently been witnessed by scientists. It sounds fanciful, doesn't it? But it is literally a fact that the automatic recording of the heart's action by means of tracings from the point of a tiny blaze appears to have been made a practicable method of determining the condition of the heart, more reliable than any other test that can be applied.

(2)

(_Boston Transcript_)

TAKING HOSPITALS TO THE EMERGENCY By F.W. COBURN

Taking the hospital to the emergency instead of the emergency to the hospital is the underlying idea of the Bay State's newest medical unit--one which was installed in three hours on the top of Corey Hill, and which in much less than half that time may tomorrow or the next day be en route post haste for Peru, Plymouth, or Pawtucketville.

(3)

(_Kansas City Star_)

MUST YOUR HOME BURN?

Autumn is the season of burning homes.

Furnaces and stoves will soon be lighted. They have been unused all summer and rubbish may have been piled near them or the flues may have rusted and slipped out of place un.o.bserved in the long period of disuse. Persons start their fires in a sudden cold snap. They don't take time to investigate. Then the fire department has work to do.

(4)

(_New York Times_)

ONLY PUBLIC SCHOOL FOR CHILDREN WITH POOR EYES

There was opened down Hester Street way last week the only public school in the world for children with defective eyes. Bad eyesight has been urged for years as a cause of backwardness and incorrigibility in school children. Now the public school authorities plan, for the first time, not only to teach children whose eyes are defective, but to cure them as well.

(5) (_The Outlook_)

DISEASED TEETH AND BAD HEALTH BY MATTHIAS NICOLL, JR.

The complete disappearance of teeth from the human mouth is the condition towards which the most highly cultivated cla.s.ses of humanity are drifting. We have already gone far on a course that leads to the coming of a toothless age in future generations. Only by immediate adoption of the most active and widespread measures of prevention can the human tooth be saved from the fate that has befallen the leg of the whale.

(6)

(_Harper's Weekly_)

THE SPAN OF LIFE

BY WALTER E. WEYL

You who begin this sentence may not live to read its close. There is a chance, one in three or four billions, that you will die in a second, by the tick of the watch. The chair upon which you sit may collapse, the car in which you ride may collide, your heart may suddenly cease. Or you may survive the sentence and the article, and live twenty, fifty, eighty years longer.

No one knows the span of your life, and yet the insurance man is willing to bet upon it. What is life insurance but the bet of an unknown number of yearly premiums against the payment of the policy? * * * * The length of your individual life is a guess, but the insurance company bets on a sure thing, on the average death rate.

(7)

(_The Outlook_)

"AMERICANS FIRST"

BY GREGORY MASON

Every third man you meet in Detroit was born in a foreign country.

And three out of every four persons there were either born abroad or born here of foreign-born parents. In short, in Detroit, only every fourth person you meet was born in this country of American parents.